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Feb 14, 2015

The Snowden Case: Whistleblower or Traitor?

Edward Joseph Snowden was born June 21,
1983, an American computer professional who leaked classified
information from the NSA (National Security Agency) to the mainstream
media beginning in June of 2013. Some called him a whistleblower
patriot, but when he flew to Hong Kong in May of 2013, met with
Russian diplomats and flew to Moscow, where he received asylum
status, he became a traitor.

In June of 2013, the US Department of
State revoked his passport and the US Department of Justice charged
him with two counts of violation of the Espionage
Act and theft of government property.

In August of 2014, Russia issued a
three-year residency permit that allowed him to travel freely in the
country and travel abroad for up to three months. He has been seeking
asylum in the European Union. Germany rejected his application in
June of 2013 and when receiving a renewal application from Snowden,
Germany announced in November 2014 it was rejected again.

Snowden trained for a position in the
CIA computer network security in 2006 and in 2007 he was assigned
with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland as well as US mission to
the United Nations. He became a top technical and cybersecurity
expert in Switzerland and was assigned the CIA mission to support
President Bush's 2008 NATO summit in Romania. In February 2009,
Snowden resigned
from the CIA. In the same year, Snowden became a contractor for
Dell Computers, managing computer systems for multiple government
agencies, assigned at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, instructing
officials and military officers how to defend their networks from
Chinese hackers. During his four years at Dell, Snowden rose from
supervising NSA computer system upgrades to working as an “expert
in cyber counterintelligence at several US locations.

In 2011, he returned to Maryland, where
he spent one year as lead technologist on Dell's CIA account. Snowden
began downloading documents describing US government electronic
spying programs while working for Dell in April 2012. Investigators
estimated that out of 50,000 to 200,000 documents, Snowden gave
journalist Glenn
Greenwald and Laura
Poitras, most were copied
while working at Dell.

Dell reassigned Snowden in March of
2011 to Hawaii as lead technologist to the NSA information-sharing
office. His duty title was system
administrator. He created a backup system for the NSA that
was implemented nationwide. He had virtually unlimited access to NSA
data.

Snowden began to express concern about
constitutional violations committed by the NSA to several employees
and two supervisors. According to an NSA spokeswoman, she stated
that they had “not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden's
contention that he brought these matters to anyone's attention”.

In March 2014, during testimony to the European Parliament,
Snowden wrote that before revealing classified information he had
reported "clearly problematic programs" to ten officials,
who he said did nothing in response.[98]
In a May 2014 interview, Snowden told NBC News that after bringing
his concerns about the legality of the NSA spying programs to
officials, he was told to stay silent on the matter.

Snowden first contacted Glenn
Greenwald, journalist for The
Guardian, in 2012. It was then he made the decision to leak
classified documents from the NSA, and provided Poitras and Greenwald
documents in New York City. Snowden communicated using encrypted
email.

It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email
and instant messaging contact lists,[149]
searching email content,[150]
tracking and mapping the location of cell phones,[151]
undermining attempts at encryption
via Bullrun[152][153]
and that the agency was using cookies
to "piggyback" on the same tools used by internet
advertisers "to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to
bolster surveillance."[154]
The NSA was shown to be "secretly" tapping into Yahoo and
Google data centers to collect information from "hundreds of
millions" of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea
cables using the MUSCULAR
surveillance program.[131][132]

NSA spent
$52 billion in fiscal year 2013 to spy agencies that included US
private tech companies for their communications networks.

Snowden stated in a January 2014
interview with German television that the NSA does not limit its data
collection to national security issues, accusing the agency of
conducting industrial
espionage.

When Snowden, who believed what he did
was right, met with representatives of human rights organizations in
July of 2013, he stated:

The 4th
and 5th
Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the
Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties
forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US
Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues
that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see,
somehow legitimize an illegal affair...

I
believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg
in 1945: "Individuals have international duties which
transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual
citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes
against peace and humanity from occurring."[185]

In December of 2013, Snowden was asked
“who elected” him to expose the NSA surveillance program, and
replied:

Dianne
Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions [in
committee hearings]. Mike
Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden... The FISA
court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on
things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever
intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of
oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed
this, abdicated their responsibility. It wasn't that they put it on
me as an individual—that I'm uniquely qualified, an angel
descending from the heavens—as that they put it on someone,
somewhere … You have the capability, and you realize every other
[person] sitting around the table has the same capability but they
don't do it. So somebody has to be the first.
In January 2014, Snowden said his "breaking point"
was "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James
Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. [Transcript,
Courage Foundation]

In March of 2014, Snowden stated that he had reported policy or
legal issues related to spy programs to more than 10 officials.
In February 2014, former congressman, Ron
Paul, began a petition urging the Obama administration to
grant
Snowden clemency. In the same year, President Jimmy Carter stated
that if he were president he would “certainly consider” providing
Snowden a pardon. Former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
insinuated that she believed Snowden's motives
are suspicious. She also stated that information he leaked has
helped
terrorists.
In May of 2014, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, stated
that Snowden had “damaged his country very significantly” and
“hurt operational security” by telling terrorists how to evade
detection. Quite hypocritical from a man who provided false testimony
during the Vietnam War about alleged 'atrocities' within his military
operations there.
Snowden is a whistleblower that turned to traitorous actions,
jeopardizing US national security and CIA operatives. He did so
because he was afraid, from past actions by the federal government,
that as a whistleblower he would become an enemy of the state and was
in danger.
In an Oxford-style debate in February of 2014, Intelligence
Squared debated in New York City entitled: “Snowden
Was Justified”. After the debate, 54% found that Snowden was
justified and 35% were against.
In June of 2013, Larry
Klayman, founder of Judicial
Watch, filed a lawsuit claiming that the federal government
had unlawfully collected metadata for his telephone calls and was
harassing him. In Klayman
v. Obama, Judge Richard J. Leon, ruled the bulk metadata
program to be probably
unconstitutional. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against James
Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, for the same reason
as Judicial Watch, in ACLU
v. Clapper.
According to the Pew
Research Center, July
of 2014:

While the majority of Americans and others around the world
condoned spying on suspected terrorists, they agreed it is
unacceptable to spy on American citizens.

That is pretty much how the majority of Americans see the event.

In February of 2014, Snowden joined
the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation,
co-founded by Daniel Ellsberg. Journalists Glenn Greenwald and
Laura Poitras also chair the board. On February 18, 2014, Snowden was
elected
as Rector of the University of Glasgow. During that year, Snowden
attended teleconferences concerning interactive technology.
The whole affair has created a 'Snowden Effect', where the public,
already suspicious of federal government committing unconstitutional
acts, and has been proven so on several occasions involving the Obama
administration, has also prompted Apple Inc. to update its iOS 8 that
encrypts all data inside it to protect is consumers. In addition,
Apple no longer complies with NSA and law enforcement requests for
user data, stating that it does not possess the key to unlock data on
the iPhone.
It has also been announced that Google's
Android operating system would have encryption enabled by
default in upcoming versions.
Snowden's emigration through Hong Kong inspired a production
team to produce a low-budget five-minute
film entitled Verax.
A film entitled Snowden's Great Escape is scheduled for
release
this year. [January
2015]

The film documents that people who were contacting Snowden while in Hong Kong, stated he did not give any information to the Russians or anyone else except the journalists mentioned.James Madison:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest
of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the
place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices
should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is
government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human
nature?

Mark Alexander,
Patriot Post, wrote an essay entitled: It's
the Profiling, Stupid!
What should have been added to the essay was that the Obama
administration excluded surveillance of mosques, centers for
subversive and underground 'cell' activity of Islamic Jihadists.
Those mosques and Muslim organizations like CAIR are designated by
the IRS as non-profit institutions – but the Tea Party, a
pro-constitution organization, was a target by the IRS.
Mark Alexander wrote:

If conscience was such a problem, Snowden could have taken
any number of other jobs. He also had much better options than the
Leftmedia to make his concerns known. If not the chain of command in
place within the NSA, he likely would have received a fair hearing by
approaching a senator opposing the NSA’s programs. Perhaps
something can be learned from Snowden’s choice of Glenn Greenwald
as the journalist to whom he would leak: Greenwald is a well-known
hard-left attack dog and supporter of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning,
currently facing court martial for having aided our enemies by
leaking to WikiLeaks the largest trove of classified documents in
U.S. history.

The result because of Snowden's was that focus was upon himself
instead of the NSA corruption scandal. This practice was already in
place by the Bush administration before Obama took office; therefore
it is not just pertaining to politics, but the unconstitutional acts
of our federal government, as well as that it perceives that American
citizens, in general, are more of a danger than Islamic Jihadists. If
the Feds were serious about subversive activities endangering
national security and welfare of the American people – there would
not be ANY Islamic Jihad training camps and CAIR and other
organizations would have lost their non-profit status as well as
being shut down for subversion and fraud.
Viewing all of information and actions, I came to believe that
Snowden changed from a patriotic whistleblower to a traitor because
his stolen classified documents contained not just evidence of NSA
illegal surveillance programs, but contained information that showed
others how the system works – a boon for foreign espionage
organizations, like China and Russia.
If Snowden was a sincere whistleblower and patriot, he would have
contacted one of the US Senators in Congress that could be trusted
not to cover up what was going on. He would have been protected by
the oversight committee and highly sensitive information would not
have gotten into the hands of those who mean US harm. As a side effect, Snowden furthered the distrust between Russia and the United States because of his asylum there and the capabilities of divulging classified documents that harmed our national security.
The original reason for what Snowden did was justifiable, but his ultimate actions became criminal and detrimental to national security and We the People. Now he bathes in the light of the media that exploits the affair.
Snowden's original idea of protecting fellow Americans became polluted when he abandoned his country and cooperated with other nation's officials in doing so.
In today's modern world, especially concerning progressives in the United States, the concept and designation of what a traitor is has been diluted, especially when it comes to the executive branch of the federal government. In view of the actions of Snowden, this is a case of someone who put himself before all else and the end result of his decisions and actions is traitorous. Of course, without a proper trial, this conclusion is based upon information known at this point. I am hoping, but it is false hope, that since Russia provided him asylum, that he did not divulge harmful information. It certainly has not boded well for relationship of the US and other nations, as the video pointed out. Oliver Stone film, Pride, concerns Snowden.

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